Resident Evil Retribution: A review of the ridiculous from Chazvoltaire

The Resident Evil franchise keeps getting more and more ridiculous. What started off as a take on the classic video game franchise, which didn’t REALLY mirror the video game, to now what’s become an action franchise that barely makes sense. I’m not even really saying that it’s a bad thing, but it’s a far cry from the video games, and even from where the movies started out at.

Milla Jovovich is back again as Alice and in this round we have her starting right off where she ended in Resident Evil: Afterlife. Though, the world was supposedly without water after Resident Evil: Extinction, we find Alice and company on a boat in the middle of the ocean. In a pretty sweet backwards-slow mo-camera effect, the movie starts off in reverse and tells the story of Alice’s “escape” off of the boat. Apparently escaping caused her to become unconscious though and wake up in an altered reality where she’s married to Oded Fehr and has a deaf child. From there, the movie just kinda shambles around like the zombies from yore.

This movie features the antagonist of the ‘Red Queen’ again, and even brings back Michelle Rodriguez‘s character, Rain, to fight against Alice. We get introduced to a couple of new/old RE characters in the forms of: Ada Wong(Bingbing Li) and a horribly acted Leon (Johann Urb). Seriously, his character kept smiling when someone died or he had to draw upon any sort of emotions.

Besides all that, the action sequences weren’t that bad. The fight against the two Executioners was good and I particularly liked a battle featuring Nazi Zombies a la Call of Duty: Black Ops. The film basically boiled down to a series of fights until we get to the end, where Paul W.S. Anderson makes his big reveal. The White House is the last bastion of hope and Wesker is in control of what remains of the human race. This doesn’t have to deal with the plot, which at the end is completely out the window anyway; but as an observation it should be said that Wesker (Shawn Roberts) looks completely ridiculous. His upper body is huge, but his arms are really short and so is his stature. It through me for a loop and kinda freaked me out.

The movie is set up for a sequel, seemingly the final one of the movie franchise. Like I said, I didn’t really mind the movie so much, but I hope for the ‘find’ film that they really try to put an end to this film in a semi-plausible manner.